Weekly Update: October 18, 2019

Hello everyone,

It has been a great week in third grade!  The students have been very enthusiastic and are working hard.  

Important Dates to Remember:

• Friday, October 18^th—Progress Reports
• Thursday, October 24^th-----Chapter 3 Religion Test
• Friday, October 25^th—Topic 2 Math Test & Lesson 3 Science Quiz
• Wednesday, October 30^th---Parent Teacher Conferences
• Thursday, October 31^st----Pumpkin Project Fair at 8:30-9:15am
• Thursday, October 31st---Halloween Party at 1pm

**Progress Reports**

Students will be receiving their progress reports to bring home this afternoon. They will be in their blue homework folders. Please sign and return to school. 

**Parent/Teacher Conferences**

I have made a conference sign-up sheet online using Signupgenius.com. I sent an email through the website. Many of you have already signed up which is great! If you haven’t signed up yet you can find the link here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0f44a8a828a5fb6-november3

Math: This week’s lessons focused on rounding to the nearest ten and hundred. We then moved on to estimating sums.

There will be a math test for Topic 2 next Friday.

Students are finding their interactive math notebooks helpful for reference as we progress forward through the math curriculum.

You Can Help: Posing practice problems at home will help your child gain a better sense of rounding. 

Below you will find Rounding Video Tutorials to help you better understand the strategies I am teaching students in class. This will hopefully prove helpful as you work with students at home.

Rounding to the Nearest Ten

Rounding to the Nearest Hundred

Reading: Students have been practicing building their stamina when reading independently. I have been timing the students to see how long the class as a whole could read without getting distracted. They started out the year at 1 minute and 23 seconds and this week achieved  33 minutes of uninterrupted reading. I believe the best way for students to become better readers is for them to read! I can tell we have a class full of book worms! Students normally will not spend more than 20 minutes a day reading to self but their ability to read independently for over half an hour shows they will be able to make the most of their independent reading time during Reading Rotations!

Grammar: This week we focused on subjects and predicates with a Star Wars twist. Students have been coding sentences with “The force” using “light sabers.” They have been learning that the subject is who or what the sentence is about and the predicate is what the subject is doing.

Writing: This week lessons focused on how to Show, Don’t Tell. Students practiced being descriptive writers. For example: Rather than “telling” the reader they are nervous, students learned to “show” the reader through descriptive words that paint a picture: Butterflies swarmed through my tummy as I entered my new classroom.

Next, students mapped out the sequence of their Ouch stories. They will begin drafting next week.  

Have a great weekend!